The field of the invention is office spaces and more specifically spaces that automatically adapt to user presence and optimize for specific experiences or activities within spaces.
During the course of a typical work day, employees of a company or other business entity often perform various tasks or activities. For example, during a typical day, a specific employee may work individually, may work with one other employee in a dyadic fashion to share ideas and develop new ideas, may work with two or more other persons to share information or develop concepts in a larger conference setting, may spend a portion of her day on the phone conversing with colleagues or customers, may participate in a video conference with one or more remote colleagues or clients or may spend some time resting by either napping or simply meditating.
In the office space industry it is generally recognized that space affordances can facilitate or hinder activities and that recognition has lead to differently afforded spaces that have been at least somewhat optimized for different activities. For instance, a typical personal office space may include a desk, a task chair and a computer including a display screen on the desk. In contrast, a typical conference space may include a large table, a plurality of chairs arranged about the edges of the table and a projector or large electronic display screen for presenting content from a computer or the like that is being shared within the conference space. Clearly office spaces and conference spaces are differently afforded and each set of affordances enhances the specific use assigned to the space.
In addition to assemblies that provide work surfaces, support chairs for space users and screens for accessing digital information, many spaces have other affordances that, while capable of enhancing specific activities within the spaces, are essentially ignored or are underutilized by space users for one reason or another. For instance, most office spaces include some type of lighting device(s) (e.g., a desk light, a floor lamp, overhead lighting, upward or downward directed shelf lighting, etc.) for illuminating general ambient space, work surfaces, wall surfaces, etc. Here, even where lighting devices are controllable so that light intensity can be adjusted, most lights are either off or turned on to their highest intensity level regardless of whether or not an intermediate intensity level may be optimal for some purpose. For example, in a conference room, lights are often completely on when digital content is not shared and off when digital content is not being shared with no in between. In personal office spaces lights are usually either on with high intensity or off despite the fact that other lighting settings may be optimal depending on the activity performed within the office space. Many spaces include several lighting devices which are often all on or all off regardless of whether those settings are optimized for specific activities.
Other space affordances that are rarely adjusted despite the fact that they can have a great impact on how well activities are performed within a space include temperature control devices (e.g., heaters, cooling devices, etc.), air flow devices (e.g., fans), audio devices (e.g., speakers and audio players that can play sound tracks), electronic display screens that are not being used to present content within a space, etc.
There are several reasons space users do not optimally adjust many affordances within office spaces. First, in many cases, a user simply does not have an understanding that each of the affordances can be adjusted to optimize specific activities. For instance, for many space users high intensity light on a primary work surface with dimmed ambient light optimizes the user's ability to focus on individual work being performed on the primary work surface. Nevertheless, many space users simply rely on a single intensity ambient light to light their work surfaces. As another instance, where a person uses a space to facilitate a resting activity (e.g., take a short nap), in many cases the resting activity would be enhanced where temperature is increased by a few degrees. Nevertheless, space temperature is only rarely adjusted by space users. As yet one other example, it is known that white noise can drown out voices or other noises within a walkway adjacent a space yet even where white noise sound tracks are available to space users, the tracks are rarely played. Many other examples of optimized environmental characteristics that are not understood by space users exist.
Second, even where a space user has a general understanding that certain activities can be enhanced by optimally adjusting affordances, in many cases the user has no understanding of which settings are optimal for which activities. Here, confused, a user often simply uses affordances as set when the user occupies a space without adjusting the affordances to optimize space use for specific activities.
Third, even where a space user recognizes that activities can be enhanced by optimally adjusting affordances and has a good understanding of how those affordances should be optimized for at least some activities, in many cases different affordances are controlled by different control systems or devices and therefore, to adjust several affordances to optimal settings, a user would have to adjust many (e.g., 4-6) different devices. The burden of optimally adjusting many devices each time the activity within a space is changed means that space users simply use space with affordances set “as is” and do not bother with optimizing the affordances to specific activities. This is particularly true in cases where one person may use many different spaces during a day to perform many different tasks. For instance, in a case where an employer has remote employees that “hotel” in spaces in different facilities, most employees will not take the time to optimally set affordance characteristics even if they understand how the setting can affect their activities. In hotelling cases, often-times affordances and controls therefore are different in different spaces and, while a user may understand a control device in one space that is routinely used by the user, the user may not understand another interface for a similar affordances in a different space. The end result is that the user will not take advantage of the capability of setting optimized affordances in differently controlled spaces.
Fourth, in many cases, while a space user may understand how affordance settings can be optimized for that user for a specific activity (e.g., user preferences for individual focused work), the user often times will have no understanding of how the affordances can be optimized for other types of activities. Again, a user may understand that bright task lighting on a primary work surface with dimmed lighting in the ambient can optimally support individual focused work but may have no clue that the lighting should be changed for dyadic use of the same space where the user and another space user are sharing ideas in an open conversation and should be changed again for video conferencing and yet again during a resting activity. In these cases, instead of manually adjusting affordances to optimize for specific activities, users typically forego adjustment and simply use less than optimal settings for specific activities.
In addition to there being optimized environment characteristics for different activities performed in a space, it is believed that there are also different optimized characteristic sets for different phases of any given activity. For instance, in the case of a space optimized for facilitating a resting activity (e.g., a short nap), there may be several phases of the activity including an invite phase that invites a user to use the space for a rest activity, a welcome phase that helps a user take control of the space, an activity phase during which a resting activity is performed and an emerge phase that helps a user emerge from the resting activity. Here, there are optimal changes to a space environment that can enhance each of the different phases of the activity. Again, here, most users are unaware of optimized affordance settings for phases and even if they understand that optimized affordance settings for each phase exist, the burden of adjusting the affordance settings is too great to be performed for each activity within the space.
Thus, there is a need for a system where affordance settings within a space can be optimized for the space and for specific activities within the space in a simplified manner. There is also a need for a system where affordance settings can be optimized easily for specific users of spaces.